Thinking about doing

I’ve been thinking about writing. In my mind, I sit down at the computer and write a post. I’ve been doing that a lot lately, with writing, and doing other things.

This is one of the ADD-ish things that I’ve been experiencing more during my pregnancy. It’s a blast from the past; in the worst times I think I could sit in bed in the morning for an hour doing stuff in my head. Then I’d forget I was sitting in bed thinking. By the time I got out of bed, my mental day had tired me out, and the things I had wanted to do had lost their luster because I had already done them.

This seems to me a weird twist on "visualizing your actions" the way we talk about athletes or other success-seekers setting themselves up to accomplish their goals. I know there’s more here….

For now, I’ll leave it at one of my pregnancy’s features: one of the field trips I’m taking to the past. Several people have asked me what it’s like to be off my ADD meds. In general, some things are harder, and some things are different than they were off meds before. Some of that may be because pregnancy hormones give my brain some stability, and I think some is because I have changed. The fact that do stuff in my head doesn’t send me into an anxious tizzy; it’s just something that can me mildly annoying, especially when there seems to be a failure to launch in real life.

There’s a little bit more to capture here. I didn’t have the thinking-about-doing fun for all of my pregnancy; for most of it I was too groggy and sleepy, which in some ways was pleasant. More recently I started taking supplemental iron for my supposedly mild anemia, and of course other things may have made me more energetic as well- point being, all of a sudden I had more energy. At least enough to think more.

The darkest days were those; with enough energy that waking up in the morning involved conscious brain activity rather than sleepwalking, but not enough energy to do much at all. I seem to have energy to do more, and it is infinitely more satisfying to cross things off my list than it is to wander around mentally. But even when I can’t, it’s so much easier now that I don’t kick myself when I’m down.